Security Issues and Privacy Concerns in the Implementation of Wireless Body Area Network

Abstract

The rapid growth of elderly population is a global concern and a burden on healthcare services as special health challenges appear for this segment of the population. An innovative way of patient monitoring is possible due to the recent advancements in electronics that have emerged with a number of devices which can provide continuous, real time remote healthcare monitoring to the patients even if they are freely moving around and not in hospital beds. The constant miniaturization of these electronic devices has made it possible to wear these sensors either on the clothing or body or even implanted inside the body. An unprecedented growth of smart phones and Internet technology all over the world would be a boon in this area. The recorded information, sent by these wearable sensors can be collected locally using some PDA or mobile phone. These collected medical data values may be analyzed in brief against the stored threshold values using an app on the mobile phone in real time. Collective Information may be transmitted to a centralized server periodically or immediately in case of emergency medical response required in life critical situations. The submitted medical information is used for clinical diagnosis & experts' advice and long term storage in healthcare database for future references. In this paper we discuss architecture of the Healthcare System and asses the security issues and privacy concerns while collecting patient medical data from sensors to mobile device and further submitting this data to the centralized server. The security and privacy protection of sensitive and private patient medical data is a major unsolved concern and a break into the system is possible. We also discuss the other challenges in the implementation of WBAN and provide a conclusion.